Tag: Mccain

The revival of John McCain’s presidential candidacy, now expected to carry him through to his party’s nomination, can be interpreted as either proof of the judgment of Republican primary voters or evidence of the paucity of alternative choices.

After Super Tuesday, Democrats are worrying that a long Clinton-Obama contest might irreparably damage the party’s prospects in November. But, as longtime political reporter and former Los Angeles Times City Editor Bill Boyarsky points out, the bigger threat is a McCain-Huckabee ticket.

Super Tuesday, Super Duper Tuesday, Plus-Size Tuesday, Vastly Engorged and Rotund Tuesday turned into a serious case of political bulimia. Never before have so many gorged on such huge portions of political expectations only to find themselves purged the next morning.

Rush Limbaugh’s said it, and now Charles Hurt from Rupert Murdoch’s Big Apple tabloid, the New York Post, is joining in the chorus of conservatives who worry that Sen. John McCain would betray the GOP’s core right-wing base if he inches any closer to the White House.

Perhaps because neither Obama, Clinton nor McCain won a crushing victory, the top candidates’ post-Super Tuesday speeches repeated earlier themes, though with renewed focus on each other. McCain’s breathy tribute to himself would be the exception.

As the dust settles from Tuesday’s “national primary,” we know two things: John McCain is the Republican front-runner and the Democrats still have a race on their hands. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama swapped states all night. Obama won more states overall, but Hillary took home the big prizes of California and New York. Updated

Curb your enthusiasm. Even if your favored candidate did well on Super Tuesday, ask yourself if he or she will seriously challenge the bloated military budget that President Bush has proposed for 2009.

There’s a reason campaigns are more expensive than ever: commercials. Although they try, the candidates can’t be in every Super Tuesday state at the same time, and the most effective way of reaching millions of people in one state is the same for politicians as it is for Tylenol. Even Barack Obama, who has bet big on his grass-roots organization, spent around $4 million on ads in the last week of January.

New polls show Barack Obama closing in on Hillary Clinton’s lead, nationally, in California and among women voters, which may be why either the Clinton campaign or some ally is engaging in that unsavory campaign tactic, the push poll.

OK, so clearly Ann Coulter is not above leaning heavily on hyperbole to raise a few eyebrows and sell a few books, but this time she even managed to shock us a little with her announcement on Fox’s “Hannity & Colmes” that she’d go to bat for Hillary Clinton if she’s up against John McCain for the presidency, because, Coulter said, Clinton’s “more conservative” than McCain.

If the Arizona senator secures the Republican presidential nomination, his victory would signal a revolution in American politics—a divorce, after a 28-year marriage, between the Republican and conservative establishments.

Now that the presidential field has been winnowed to four—barring a miraculous return by one of the contestants recently voted off the island—the new national pastime is gaming the electability factor.

California’s celebrity governor has thrown his muscle behind the McCain campaign. Despite the occasional pander, McCain still plays better with California’s moderates than Mitt Romney, who appears to have been embraced, if reluctantly, by the more conservative elements of his party.

There were some heated exchanges in Wednesday’s debate between the Republican candidates. John McCain and Mitt Romney argued about who wanted to stay in Iraq longer and Ron Paul won a round of applause when he said the front-runners were bickering over “technicalities” while their war bankrupts the country.

Rudy Giuliani is expected to endorse John McCain at the Reagan library in California on Wednesday. The man who suffered one of the most dramatic campaign implosions in recent memory explained his collapse to supporters this way: “You don’t always win, but you can always try to do it right, and you did.” Although doing it a bit earlier, too, wouldn’t have hurt.

Joe Lieberman, an “Independent Democrat,” staunchly supports the Iraq war, has voted to throw away billions on defense boondoggles, generally gravitates toward all things Republican and has endorsed GOP presidential candidate John McCain, but he draws the line at running alongside McCain as a vice president candidate. Lieberman says that if asked to join a ticket, he would tell McCain, “You can find much better.” For once, Joe, we agree with you.

He’s not exactly clear on this point, but what Sen. John McCain doesn’t achieve through specificity he drives home through sheer repetition: America can expect “other wars” in the future. In this clip he delivers that warning to his “friends” at a campaign stop in Florida.

Sure, it can’t help but be at least momentarily interesting that The New York Times’ editorial posse has announced its pick of the Republican and Democratic litters for this presidential election cycle. But far more compelling than Team Gray Lady’s rationale for choosing its favorites is what it had to say about fellow New Yorker Rudy Giuliani.

What’s to be done about the sagging U.S. economy? What’s with John McCain’s dogged insistence that we’re “succeeding” in Iraq? Thursday night found the handful of Republican candidates still in the ‘08 race for the White House facing off in Florida. Here’s what they had to say.

What is it with the, shall we say, seasoned action stars endorsing Republican presidential candidates? First we had Huck ‘n’ Chuck, and now Sylvester Stallone has come out in support of Republican front-runner John McCain.

John McCain dashed Mike Huckabee’s hopes of a strong showing in the first Southern primary with a big victory in South Carolina on Saturday. McCain famously lost a nasty contest with George W. Bush there eight years ago. By contrast, Mike Huckabee said his rival’s campaign was “civil and good and decent.”

On behalf of his faux-fave candidate, (real) Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee, pseudo-pundit Stephen Colbert performs his own brand of negative campaigning, taking to the phones to quiz voters about how their potential support for Huckabee rival John McCain might change if McCain were to have fathered an “illegitimate pirate baby,” among other alarming scenarios.

Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney is engaged in a make-or-break contest in Michigan, and his eleventh-hour mailers to supporters are striking an urgent note, as evidenced by this recent swipe at rivals John McCain, Rudy Giuliani and Mike Huckabee over their stands on immigration.

The turmoil in the Republican presidential contest, which seems to produce a new front-runner every month, owes to President Bush’s unpopularity and the fact that even members of his own party want to turn the page on the last seven years.

Two new polls, one from The New York Times and CBS News and the other by The Washington Post and ABC News, show John McCain at the head of the Republican race nationally. The same polls also show Barack Obama closing the gap with rival Hillary Clinton, who still maintains a lead, though by a much smaller margin than previously.

Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Mike Huckabee and John McCain have gotten plenty of ink in the last week, but the other candidates for president want you to know they’re still in it. John Edwards, who staked a lot on Iowa and placed second there, says he will campaign until his party’s convention because, “Up until now, about half of 1 percent of Americans have voted.”

“I found my own voice,” Hillary Clinton said in her New Hampshire victory speech, admitting to more than just a bumpy campaign. Instead, she appeared to be pointing at the stilted rhetoric and focus-grouping that have plagued her run for president. With Iowa and New Hampshire behind her, the senator’s campaign promise, it seems, is to speak from the heart.

When asked in a New Hampshire town hall meeting about the possibility of being in Iraq for 50 more years, John McCain says it could be 100 years and that would be “fine with me” so long as American troops aren’t getting killed. Comparing Iraq to South Korea and Japan, McCain suggests it would behoove America to maintain a long-term military presence there.

As he addressed a room full of members of the Iowa Christian Alliance in the small city of Cedar Falls, the senator demonstrated how hard it is for him to find his way through the tangled forest of Christian right doctrine.

Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign has been picking up momentum, but now the candidate finds himself in a war of words with the Drudge Report. On Thursday, McCain vehemently denied that, as was posted on Drudge, he once gave “special treatment” to a lobbyist and has been trying to pressure The New York Times to kill the story.

Sen. Joseph Lieberman, a self-described “Independent Democrat,” is expected to turn his back on the Democratic candidates to endorse John McCain for president. It’s a fitting move for the George Bush apologist, who was rejected by the primary voters of his own party for his unabashed support of the war.

The CNN/YouTube debate was a depressing spectacle. There was little inspiration for the future, no sense that Republicans are grappling with why their party has become so unpopular, and few departures from rigid adherence to the party line on taxes, guns, gay rights and other questions.

The CNN/YouTube Republican debate could easily have been written off as a gimmick, or at least just another in a glut of debates, but it actually delivered some interesting moments, from the YouTuber who asked what Jesus would do about the death penalty to Mitt Romney explaining torture to John McCain.

Rarely does the endorsement of a presidential candidate make any national impression, especially when offered by a retired local politician. Former New Jersey Gov. Tom Kean may well disprove that maxim, however, not so much because he chose McCain but because he rejected Giuliani.

Now that Hillary Clinton has hushed, for the moment, the chatter about how she can be both a woman and a presidential front-runner whose opponents pile on, can we pay attention to the way the most powerful “gender card” is really going to be played in the 2008 campaign?

“That’s an excellent question” normally doesn’t make the list of utterances that can get a candidate in trouble on the campaign trail. But this presidential campaign isn’t what anyone would call normal.

One of the few things the Republican and Democratic presidential contests have in common is the relentlessness with which candidates on both sides are wrapping themselves in orthodoxy. Heretics need not apply.

John McCain’s campaign is in dire straits, which may be why he told Beliefnet that he would prefer a Christian president who would “carry on in the Judeo-Christian principled tradition,” and that “the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation.”

Senate Republicans have successfully blocked a three-month expansion of troop leave, which the Democrats hoped would provide pressure to withdraw without cutting off funds. John McCain called the effort to give our fighting men and women 15 months off between combat deployments “dangerous.”

Cracked.com has a review of the candidates’ websites, including “awkward attempts at hipness” and “weirdest moments.” John McCain’s virtual outpost, for example, won this critique: “The main image from the pre-site landing page essentially says, ‘Welcome to the online obituary for the late Senator John McCain.’ ”